All Hollow

by Simeon Courtie

  ‘Shhhhh, now,’ purred Ed, which made Dane thrash some more. Mary handed Ed the needle and Petra saw him stop as he took her hand. He pulled her gloved fingers gently under the light, admiring a ring slipped over the blue latex. Even with her eye half-open Petra saw the sparkle of diamonds and a lavender glint of tanzanite.

  ‘That really suits you, darling,’ Ed said.

  ‘You fucking bitch!’ raged Dane. ‘You had it all along! You stole it!’

  Mary smiled. ‘I was given it. Your girlfriend said “please take it” – didn’t she, Ed?’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  Dane twisted and roared. Ed calmly squirted a tiny jet of fluid from the upturned syringe and, completely ignoring Dane’s bellowing, said to Mary, ‘That was a stroke of genius, angel – pocketing the ring, spotting the grid. I was genuinely looking for it until you quietly led me away. The discreet mastermind, hatching a plan while everyone’s nose was on the ground.’

  She leaned across Dane’s contorted body and kissed Ed gently on the lips. ‘You’re welcome. He seemed too good a specimen to waste.’

  Ed gave an admiring nod to the climber’s tense physique and placed the needle against Dane’s arm, but Mary gently placed her hand on Ed’s, stopping him.

  ‘HELP!’ shouted Dane, but Mary remained calm.

  ‘Wait, Ed.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘PETRA! WAKE UP!’ screamed Dane, which made Petra quickly shut her eye.

  ‘No anaesthetic,’ she heard Mary say.

  ‘He’ll scream the place down.’

  ‘He tried to run. He needs to suffer.’

  Petra heard the panting, panicking Dane say, ‘What? HELP!’ and opened her eyes just a smidge.

  Ed seemed to be considering Mary’s request, so she pressed on: ‘He hurt me, Edward. You’re supposed to protect me.’

  ‘What about the noise? It’s nearly dawn. Someone will hear.’

  ‘HELLLLP!’ shouted the now hoarse Dane, no longer thrashing, half sobbing.

  ‘You’re right, my darling,’ smiled Mary. ‘Of course you’re right.’

  Petra saw Mary place a finger and thumb on Dane’s throat, as if measuring his Adam’s apple, like she was checking something. Dane looked at her, dumbstruck.

  ‘What?’ she asked him. ‘Now you stop screaming?’

  ‘HELLLLP MEEEEE PLEEEEASE!’ he cried.

  Mary smiled, adjusted her fingers and said, ‘Thank you,’ before swiftly clasping a scalpel in her hand and resting it vertically on Dane’s throat. With a precise smack of her palm onto the clenched fist, the blade sank an inch through skin and cartilage.

  Dane’s cries became a hoarse, guttural, wheezing shower of blood. Petra flinched, winced and prayed she hadn’t been noticed. Dane’s eyes were saucers of terror; his open throat coughed puffs of blood onto Mary’s scrubs.

  ‘It’s only your vocal cords, Dane,’ she smiled, stroking his fringe with the tenderness of a comforting nurse. ‘You’ll live.’ Then her face dropped, all warmth banished. ‘For now.’

  Petra’s head was clearing, the anaesthetic hangover fading. She risked a minuscule squirm to test the tension of her restraints. Casting a downward glance, she could see that the fibre strap on her chest was held by a metal pull-tag, like a luggage strap. Her hand was lying right next to her hip, so without looking she let her tentative fingers silently explore the strap across her waist, and felt the same cold metal of a similar latch. With a gentle push of her thumb she felt the belt slip, the pressure on her hips release.

  Then she saw Ed. He’d turned away from Dane’s gurney and had returned holding a polished, shiny medical saw. Dane emitted a wheezing, empty screech, sending a mist of bloody air ballooning up from his neck. ‘Wha … what are you doing?’ he stammered in a rasping, bubbling whisper.

  ‘This might hurt a little,’ Ed replied.

  Mary pulled the lid from a black marker pen with her teeth, leaned over and drew a dotted line around Dane’s right leg, just below the knee. Petra saw Dane twisting and straining against his straps, which only made Ed pull them even tighter.

  ‘No! Please!’ coughed Dane’s breathless mouth.

  Petra watched Ed place the saw blade on Dane’s leg, carefully lining it up. With a jerk, he pushed the barbed steel teeth through tensed flesh. Dane howled a hopeless blast of empty air, spattering speckles of blood onto them both.

  ‘Stop!’ Dane pleaded. ‘Stop, you sick fuck! You’re crazy!’

  In an explosion of fury, before Ed could continue, Mary snatched up her scalpel and drove it through the back of Dane’s hand, causing a blow-hole fountain of blood-spray as he tried to scream.

  ‘Crazy?’ she snapped. ‘You really have no idea. Ed is about to make history, you dumb cretin. A lifetime of being told human limb grafts are impossible, that no immunosuppressant is capable of stopping the body’s rejection, and yet here we are. Here you are, about to change all that. This genius –’ she looked at Ed with adoring eyes ‘– will change the world.’

  Dane was panting, sweating, looking in horror at the scalpel protruding from his hand.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about genius,’ Ed smiled modestly.

  ‘You are, darling. They said it couldn’t be done.’

  ‘She’s right, Dane. You are about to make history. Back when no one would listen, I knew that what we’re about to do was possible. Unfortunately the very institutes that were supposed to be supporting my research were funded by the industries that have invested millions in prosthetic limbs. No one was going to wave goodbye to that cash cow.’

  ‘Corporate greed, Dane, you know how it is,’ Mary sighed.

  ‘And besides,’ shrugged Ed, ‘all the research money goes into cancer.’

  ‘Fucking cancer.’ There was a beat of silence and then Mary’s mood brightened. ‘But this is it! They said it could never be done, and God knows it hasn’t been easy. But Dane … you’re the special one. The last transplant so nearly worked.’ She looked at a black plastic body bag slumped against the far door like a bin-liner waiting to be taken out to the trash. Petra quickly joined the dots – the redhead girl who’d been lying in her place. Victim of their last botched surgery.

  ‘You see, Dane –’ Ed was waving the saw at Dane as he preached his message ‘– if you had died here tonight inside the Rock, running from gangsters and smugglers, you’d be a nobody. You’d have achieved nothing. But giving up this leg … you’re something Dane. You’re proof. Part of something that will last forever.’

  Petra was watching everything through half-closed eyes, as still as a sleeping statue. Any movement now would be seen. Dane was sobbing, weak and defeated. Ed pulled a stainless steel IV stand on wheels nearer to the table. A clear polythene bag hung from the loop in the stand, and Petra could see large, handwritten letters on its label: ISARC-13.

  ‘You should be proud,’ Mary said, looking down at Dane. ‘You’ll be the evidence that ISARC works. Immunosuppressive Anti-Rejection Chemical. Literally a world-changing innovation. Once Ed’s proved it’s effective here, he can go public, recreate it in a research lab, let the world discover his brilliance at a transplant hospital, and as if from nowhere he’s vindicated, rich, famous and –’

  ‘And all on my own. Edward Pilkington: he was right all along.’

  ‘All on his own! My Edward. And all you can do is whine about your leg.’

  Desperate, Dane hoarsely whispered, ‘You’re mad! Mad! And stupid! You think you can graft my leg onto yours? You’re going to have to chop your own fucking stump off!’

  Ed smiled at Mary and said, ‘You see? I told you he was brighter than he looked.’

  ‘We’re prepped for that, smart-arse,’ Mary said in a withering tone. She gestured to an empty gurney behind her, draped in fresh polythene.

  ‘Surgery?’ rasped Dane ‘We’ll die of blood loss!’

  Petra breathed slowly, full of pride for Dane, manfully attempting to engage these lunatics, talk his way to some sort of escape.

&
nbsp; ‘You’re right,’ Ed said. ‘Death from blood loss is a real possibility … for you. I’m lucky, though. I have a ready supply of matched blood right here. Thanks to my twin.’

  Mary leaned across the gurney and pecked a kiss onto Ed’s lips. ‘Mummy and Daddy would be so proud of what we’ve achieved.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he murmured looking into her eyes. ‘What happened at home will have all been worth it.’

  With barely a beat to compose himself, Ed threw his weight into sawing at Dane’s leg. A chaotic explosion of rasping, thrashing and hacking surrounded the table. Petra couldn’t watch, but with Mary and Ed so consumed in their grim task, and Dane putting up such a fight, she stole her chance. Twisting her hips, she wriggled up the gurney enough to slip her left arm free. Glancing at the carnage to check that she had not been noticed, she reached over and undid her straps.

  She lay still. The scene of the amputation had grown quiet. Dane had passed out. Ed paused to wipe his brow like a workman sawing a stubborn piece of timber. No longer needed to hold down Dane, Mary had stepped away from the table and was casually inserting a bloodline catheter into her arm. Petra watched her secure the needle across her vein with tape and saw the floppy tube turn dark with blood, slowly filling a bag in her hand.

  ‘How long before you can walk on this?’ Mary asked, in the same idle way she might have asked about the weather. ‘I really want to take that holiday we’ve been promising ourselves.’

  Ed furrowed his brow in thought. ‘Five weeks? Four if the ISARC is as effective as I expect.’ He leaned into his task again. The rasp of saw on bone gave way to easier strokes through sinew and flesh. ‘Finally,’ he muttered as the last piece of skin snapped and the leg dropped loose, a massive pool of dark, warm blood dripping onto the floor.

  ‘Is he dead yet?’ asked Mary.

  She never got a reply. Like a panther snaring an unsuspecting lamb, Petra was on her. Gripping the trolley frame for leverage, she catapulted herself from horizontal to a mid-air lunge in the blink of an eye, wrenching the bloodline from the bag as she engulfed her prey. Mary screamed, the flapping tube spraying her blood across them both. Petra had her pinned down but saw Ed snatching the saw from Dane’s leg and clambering around the table.

  Petra’s brief distraction was all Mary needed. From the medical detritus around them she scooped an old, stained scalpel and plunged it into Petra’s thigh. An animal scream roared from within Petra, pain shooting through her. Planting a knee in Mary’s chest and drenched in her blood, Petra clawed at the space above them, finding the edge of a battered steel shelving cabinet.

  Pulling like an athlete twice her size, she hauled the shelves towards them. As they tilted she pulled harder, hoisting herself off Mary as dozens of jars of chemicals rained down. The noise was spectacular: smashing glass, deafening steel, and the screams, the agonising wails of Mary underneath it all.

  Somewhere among all this Ed was shouting, ‘Noooooo!’ but Petra was standing fast, eyes locked on Mary. The woman was slapping, wiping and flapping in agony as a cocktail of chemicals blistered and scorched her skin. Her scrubs were smouldering as they shrunk and clung to her hissing flesh.

  Ed flung the gurney out of the way and leapt at Petra with the bloody saw. She stooped, avoiding the blade, and swung a kick at Ed’s knee. There was a splintering crack, but no shouts of pain from Ed. His prosthetic leg had taken the impact and was buckled, half attached and sticking out from his knee at a grotesque angle.

  Off balance, he stumbled back into the wall. Petra saw disbelief in his face, shock at how quickly the tables had turned. Still upright, Ed picked up some sort of medical retractor, a length of steel with a hook at one end, and swiped at Petra with it. She ducked, but not quickly enough to avoid it completely. It glanced off her head and planted itself in the IV bag of ISARC-13, tearing it open and spilling its contents.

  ‘What have you done?’ he gasped. ‘Years … years of my life. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!’

  Mary was shoving her way out of the smashed shelving, mopping herself with old scrubs, but Petra saw her chance. She flew across the obliterated laboratory to the swing door, smacked the latch and pushed. Panting, caked in blood, she glanced back. Mary was on her knees, blistering welts on her face, looking for Ed. He was lost, disconnected, shaking his head, unable to comprehend the ruinous end of his dream. Dane was pale. Dane was still. Dane was dead.

  Gritting her teeth, Petra clasped the scalpel in her fist. With a grunt of pain she tore it from her thigh, dropped it and ran.

  Chapter 19

  Jurado was back near his patrol car, checking the main gate. No one was going inside the Rock for a few days. What a night. He’d had close calls, taken countless risks and broken many laws for a bundle of cash, but tonight was the worst. He gazed into the mouth of the tunnel, his heart sinking at the thought of what kind of mess the Pilkington twins had left for him to drag through the dark to his boat and slip to the fish in the Strait of Gibraltar. He shrugged. If it was too messy he’d ask for a few thousand more. They were good for it, and he could make life difficult for them if he chose.

  He rattled the iron gate, the jangle of the chain echoed down the chasm, and he turned away. A pink ribbon of light was brushing the grey sky to the east. The solo birdsong of a keen early riser drifted across from higher up the Rock. In less than an hour it would be light. The air was chilly and fresh.

  Settling into the driver’s seat, he started the patrol car, set the heaters on and the sound of a night-time smooth-jazz station wafted from the radio. Yawning, he pointed the car slowly down the single-track road and crawled through the dim dawn light. With a final twist of the wheel, he rounded onto the tarmac main road at the base of Gibraltar’s monolith.

  And that’s when he saw it. Something in the road, up ahead. He crept slowly onwards, peering, squinting. It was a person, limping, staggering down the centre of the road. As the distance between them shortened, he stopped the car. A couple of hundred metres away, the figure stopped and fell to its knees. He narrowed his eyes and flicked the headlights to full beam. It was a girl. He edged forward. She was kneeling in the middle of the road, shielding her eyes from the glare.

  It was the hair that gave her away. Even from this distance he recognised the straggly Afro braids of the girl he’d seen on the gurney.

  ‘Huyyyyyy,’ he groaned in disbelief. Then his heart raced. This wasn’t just a defeated, half-dead girl in the beam of his headlights; this was a world of potential consequences. Sweat beaded on his brow as he checked his rear-view mirror. The road was dark. The road was empty. He pulled at his shirt collar and a gold crucifix tugged free from beneath. He held the cross to his lips as he watched the girl drop her head, exhausted.

  ‘Dios perdoname,’ he whispered. ‘No loose ends.’ He pushed his foot hard on the accelerator and closed his eyes.

  Chapter 20

  Sunshine, money, pleasure, death: one or more of these was on the minds of the tourists, commuters and delivery drivers in the hot, patient queue to pass the customs border into Spain. Among the bored pedestrians lining up to pass the small brick building stood a couple holding hands. Ed’s battered and rebuilt prosthetic was concealed beneath combat pants. Mary’s bandaged foot was poking through open-toe sandals, and the dressings on her arms and face were getting glances. She wore a large floppy sunhat to avoid prying eyes and carried an ivory silk parasol, a delicate family heirloom unblemished by the fire that had killed their parents. It had been almost a week since that chaotic, exhilarating, frustrating night, their foiled attempt to finally prove Ed’s genius. It would be weeks more before her face could see the sun again.

  ‘I’m so sorry, petal,’ Ed said, tenderly kissing her nose.

  ‘I’m sorry! I should have been more … I don’t know. Alert.’

  ‘You were brilliant. Don’t be silly.’

  The line shuffled on as their private, hushed conversation continued in the shade of the parasol. ‘Do you regret it, Edward? Do you
regret what happened?’

  ‘No! Not at all. It was a setback, Mary, that’s all.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course. We know the chemistry, we have the money, we can start again. And there’s no shortage of volunteers.’

  She squeezed his hand and they arrived at the Customs window, where a familiar cracked-leather face curled into a ghoulish grin.

  ‘Buenos dias, Hector,’ smiled Ed.

  The bulldog returned a grunt. ‘How long will you be spending in España?’

  ‘Oh just the day,’ Mary cheerfully replied.

  Ed handed over their passports. Below the frame of the window, out of sight, Hector opened them, slid out the crisp, beige 200-euro notes tucked between their pages, and said, ‘Wait please. I check details.’

  Mary heard a tutting from behind her in the queue. ‘Sorry,’ she smiled to the woman, who visibly gasped at Mary’s swollen, blistered face.

  Hector slid a USB stick into his computer and with a couple of taps on his keyboard brought up the faces and passport details of Carly, Dane and Petra.

  ‘It’s a beautiful day to visit the mainland,’ Mary said cheerfully to the embarrassed woman, who returned a curt nod before retreating behind her newspaper. Mary read the headline, ‘Tourist found dead after night climb’, and saw enough of the first paragraph to read that the body of Krishna Puram had been discovered at the foot of a steep drop at the Rock’s edge. Drinkers at the Luna Rossa bar reported that the British data analyst had announced that he was going to climb the Rock after a substantial drinking session. Police confirmed the death as ‘unexplained but not suspicious’ and were not seeking anyone else with regard to the investigation. Death by misadventure, thought Mary.

  While she was reading the woman’s newspaper-partition, Hector, unseen by anyone but Ed, hit the ‘Return’ key on his keyboard three times. ‘Uno, dos, tres …’ he murmured, sending the faces of Carly, Dane and Petra sliding across his screen. He held Ed and Mary’s passports on his scanner and added, ‘cuatro, cinco’ as their photos slid across the screen to join the others. ‘Cinco personas.’ He slid the two passports back across to Ed and said, with no hint of joy, ‘Welcome to España.’